January 1930, Van Waters formally resigned from the Los Angeles juvenile court in late 1930. During the latter half of the decade, Van Waters entered what was to be a strong, eventually intimate 40-year relationship with another wealthy philanthropist, Geraldine Morgan Thompson, who supported prison reform in her home state of New Jersey and elsewhere. Encouraged by Thompson, Dummer, and Frankfurter, Van Waters relocated to Cambridge in 1931. In that same year, publication of her 175-page Wickersham Commission report, The Child Offender in the Federal System of Justice, enhanced her reputation as an expert on juvenile justice. After declining a job offer from Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot, as an administrator in the state welfare department, she learned in November that she would soon be offered the position of superintendent at the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women at Framingham, replacing Jessie Donaldson Hodder, who had recently died. East Coast career Early years at Framingham: 1932–1948 In March 1932, Van Waters began her new job at Framingham, where she served as superintendent for the next quarter-century. From the time of its opening in 1877, the reformatory had incorporated progressive ideas about how women's prisons should function. Framingham, governed by women, included a resident physician and a resident chaplain, both of whom were women, and a system of day work for inmates who could be trusted outside the prison. Most of the inmates were serving time for prostitution, extramarital sex, "crimes against chastity", alcoholism, and other offenses known at the time as "crimes against public order", which in some cases included being homeless or being a "stubborn child". She emphasized rehabilitation rather than punishment, referred to the prison population as students rather than inmates or prisoners, relaxed the dress code, encouraged the women to talk to one another and to staff members, brought in guest speakers such as Frankfurter, Thompson, Dummer, Robert Frost, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Margaret Mead, and expanded the women's freedom of movement within the prison and outside its walls. Federal funds made possible the construction in the mid-1930s of two cottages separate from the main reformry; Hodder Hall housed inmates between the ages of 17 and 21, and Jessie Wilson Sayre Cottage housed up to 30 mothers and their babies. A nursery inside the prison accommodated up to 60 more babies whose mothers lived in the main building rather than in a cottage. A donor base of women philanthropists, including Thompson,